Welcome to the Saxena Lab

07/2024: Lab members Lynne, Xinghang, and Debangana did a great job with their Society for Developmental Biology Conference posters! And thank you to the whole lab for staffing our CDIB Dept. exhibitor booth, including giving out awesome model organism gummies!

07/2024: Ankur will serve as the Southeast Representative on the Society for Developmental Biology Board of Directors for the next three years.

06/2024: Congratulations to Xinghang, Trizi, Abigail, Fritz, and all of our collaborators on their manuscript being accepted for publication in iScience!

05/2024: The ‘Getting Fishy With It’ Podcast featured Ankur as their guest: https://gettingfishypod.substack.com/p/episode-29-is-live-all-about-zebrafish

03/2024: Undergrad Lucas Herren was selected to participate in UAB’s competitive Summer Research Academy!

02/2024: Xinghang Jiang won the Best Postdoc Poster Award at the O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Neuro-Oncology Program Retreat!

11/2023: The lab has moved to the Dept. of Cell, Developmental, & Integrative Biology at UAB Heersink School of Medicine! We ‘re thrilled and grateful to have found a supportive, collaborative, research-driven environment with a culture of excellence, ambitious vision for growth, and commitment to community involvement. The lab is hiring at several levels — please see ‘Get Involved’ page for details!

10/2023: Congrats to Xinghang Jiang for successfully defending his impressive PhD thesis!

10/2023: Lab members did a great job with their Zebrafish Disease Models Conference presentations: Xinghang’s selected talk, Debangana’s selected short talk and poster, and Lynne’s poster!

09/2023: For Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, we discussed pediatric cancer on WVON’s “Dr. in the House with Dr. Terry Mason” radio show: https://cancer.uillinois.edu/pediatric-cancer-on-wvon-dr-in-the-house/

08/2023: Undergrads Amyah Cardine, Ayushi Patel, and Rose Tharakan were again awarded Chancellor's Undergraduate Research Awards!

07/2023: Great to see a full dozen Saxena lab members attend the SDB conference and present seven posters (from Sriivatsan, Xinghang, Lynne, Alanda, Trizi, Jyoti, and Ayushi)!

07/2023: The lab was awarded a 2-year Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation Innovation Grant! We’re looking forward to continuing our work on pediatric cancer.

07/2023: The lab was awarded a 3-year Alzheimer's Association Research Grant! We’re excited to expand our work on Alzheimer’s disease.

06/2023: Undergrads Ayushi Patel and Jyoti Sundaram were awarded Honors College Travel Grants!

05/2023: Congrats to Sriivatsan G. Rajan for successfully defending his outstanding PhD thesis!

05/2023: Undergrad Jyoti Sundaram was awarded a Liberal Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Research Initiative (LASURI) Award for 2023-2024!

05/2023: The lab has been awarded a University of Illinois Cancer Center Community Outreach & Engagement Skills Fellowship! We appreciate the Cancer Center's support and recognition of our outreach efforts! https://cancer.uillinois.edu/hope-leaders-fellowships-announced/

05/2023: Grad student Xinghang Jiang won UIC’s prestigious Award for Graduate Research!

05/2023: Undergrad Amyah Cardine was awarded a third Chancellor's Undergraduate Research Award (CURA)!

05/2023: Undergrad Rose Tharakan was awarded a Chancellor's Undergraduate Research Award (CURA)!

04/2023: Grad student Sriivatsan G. Rajan won the Biological Sciences Award for Excellence in Research (for the third time)!

12/2022: Lab members did an excellent job with their ASCB conference presentations: Sriivatsan’s selected minisymposium talk, Xinghang’s selected microsymposium talk and poster, and Debangana’s poster!

11/2022: Postdoc Trizi Ibarra was selected to be an NIGMS K12 IRACDA Fellow!

09/2022: The lab’s latest preprint is live!: https://twitter.com/SaxenaLab/status/1567572314484805633?s=20&t=-ixSn-13inCNQQRsDUiVaA

09/2022: Undergrad Ayushi Patel was awarded a second Chancellor's Undergraduate Research Award (CURA) for 2022-2023!

07/2022: Well done, Xinghang, on his poster presentation at the SDB Meeting in Vancouver (and at the other 5 meetings he’s attending this year)!

07/2022: Congratulations to Sriivatsan on our invited Highlight being accepted for publication in Natural Sciences!

06/2022: Undergrad Amyah Cardine was awarded a second Chancellor's Undergraduate Research Award (CURA) for 2022-2023!

05/2022: Lab members did a great job with their Midwest Zebrafish Conference presentations: Sriivatsan’s selected talk and posters from Debangana, Lynne, and Xinghang!

05/2022: Grad students Xinghang Jiang and Sriivatsan G. Rajan both won the Biological Sciences Award for Excellence in Research, and Sriivatsan also won the Biological Sciences Award for Excellence in Service!

04/2022: Congratulations to Trizi, Xinghang, and Randall on their manuscript being accepted for publication in STAR Protocols!

03/2022: Congrats to Joe Lombardo for successfully defending his Master’s thesis!

03/2022: Postdoc Trizi Ibarra was selected for an NHLBI T32 Fellowship!

12/2021: Grad student Sriivatsan G. Rajan won UIC’s prestigious W.C. and May Preble Deiss Fund for Biomedical Research Award (i.e., Award for Graduate Research)!

11/2021: Undergrad Darren Price was awarded a Chancellor's Undergraduate Research Award (CURA)!

11/2021: Congrats to Lynne Nacke on winning 2nd Place in FASEB’s BioArt Competition (Fluorescence/Electron Microscopy category) and being featured in Science’s News In Brief!

10/2021: Thanks to the University of Illinois Cancer Center for promoting our recent work (Treffy et al., Developmental Cell 2021): https://cancer.uillinois.edu/researchers-find-location-matters-in-the-battle-against-neuroblastoma/

08/2021: Undergrads Amyah Cardine and Ayushi Patel were awarded Chancellor's Undergraduate Research Awards (CURAs) for 2021-2022!

07/2021: Well done, Sriivatsan, on his selected talk at the SDB Meeting!

07/2021: Congratulations to Randall, Sriivatsan, Xinghang, Lynne, Sam, Dani, and collaborators on their manuscript being accepted in principle for publication in Developmental Cell!

06/2021: Congratulations to Sriivatsan, Lynne, and Jagjot on their manuscript being accepted for publication in Cells & Development’s ‘Quantitative Cell and Developmental Biology’ Special Issue!

05/2021: Kaelan Wong and Fritz Navales were accepted into the Bios Postbac Fellowship Program!

05/2021: We're excited to receive the NOA for funding from NIA/NICHD to determine how signaling pathways driving olfactory neurogenesis are altered in an Alzheimer’s disease state!

04/2021: Undergrad Abigail Swick was awarded both a Chancellor's Undergraduate Research Award (CURA) and a Liberal Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Research Initiative (LASURI) Award for 2021-2022!​

03/2021: Undergrad Gokul Pareek was awarded an Honors College Undergraduate Research Grant!

11/2020: Welcome to the lab, Professor Beth LeClair! Dr. LeClair will be spending her sabbatical with us over the next year.

10/2020: The lab was awarded a University of Illinois Cancer Center Mini-Grant. We appreciate the Cancer Center's support!

07/2020: Grad students Xinghang Jiang, Joe Lombardo, and Vijay Warrier were all semifinalists in the 2020 Society for Developmental Biology Best Student Poster Competition!

07/2020: Ankur received the Young Investigator Award from the Midwest Tumor Microenvironment Meeting!

06/2020: Undergrad Kaelan Wong was awarded the department's prestigious Louis Pasteur Award for Undergraduate Research, given to one undergraduate student per year!

03/2020: We're excited to receive the NOA that makes it official -- the lab was awarded a 5-year R01 grant, "Resolving Spatiotemporally-Specific Multicellular Dynamics In Vivo During Olfactory Neurogenesis", from NICHD!

03/2020: Undergrad Jagjot Dhingra was awarded an Honors College Undergraduate Research Grant!

11/2019: Undergrad Karina Oye was awarded a Chancellor's Undergraduate Research Award (CURA)​!

10/2019: Undergrad Kaelan Wong was awarded an Honors College Undergraduate Research Grant!

10/2019: Undergrad Nathan Burg was selected as one of five finalists nationally to present his work at the NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology's Annual Conference to compete for their Prize for Undergraduate Research!

09/2019: Undergrads Jagjot Dhingra, Arefa Suleiman, and Kaelan Wong were all awarded Chancellor's Undergraduate Research Awards (CURAs), and undergrad Nathan Burg was awarded an Honors College Travel Grant!

05/2019: The lab was awarded a 1 year pilot project grant from the NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology! We look forward to building on our in vivo approaches to interrogate olfactory neurogenesis​!

05/2019: Grad student Sriivatsan G. Rajan and undergrad Nathan Burg won travel awards from the Society for Developmental Biology for the meeting in Boston, MA!

04/2019: Grad student Sriivatsan G. Rajan won the Biological Sciences Award for Excellence in Research!

04/2019: Undergrad Nathan Burg won the Chancellor's Student Service Award!

03/2019: The lab's first preprint is live!: twitter.com/SaxenaLab/status/1111373560512016385?s=20 

11/2018: Undergrad Jocelyn Garcia takes home the First Place prize!:  twitter.com/SaxenaLab/status/1063608013758427137

10/2018: Undergrad Jocelyn Garcia was selected as one of five finalists nationally to present her work at the NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology's Annual Conference to compete for their Prize for Undergraduate Research!

​08/2018: Grad student Sriivatsan G. Rajan was selected to present one of the four Basic Science talks in the medical school's university-wide GEMS Research Symposium!

08/2018: Undergrads Jagjot Dhingra and Brogan Casper-Strauss were awarded Chancellor's Undergraduate Research Awards (CURAs)!

​05/2018: Grad student Sriivatsan G. Rajan was accepted to attend the prestigious Zebrafish Development and Genetics course at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole! He also received an MBL scholarship and a UIC travel award.

04/2018: Congratulations to Sriivatsan and collaborators on our manuscript being accepted for publication in genesis's 'Neural Crest' Special Issue!

04/2018: Undergrad Sam Malkana won 1st Place (out of over 200 entries) in the university-wide UIC Student Research Forum Poster Competition (Life Sciences category)! Well done!

03/2018: Grad student Sriivatsan G. Rajan won in the Biological Sciences Research Photo Competition!

11/2017: Undergrad Jocelyn Garcia presented a poster on her work at the 2017 ABRCMS conference in Phoenix, AZ! Well done!

10/2017: Undergrad Jocelyn Garcia was awarded a Chancellor's Undergraduate Research Award (CURA)!

​10/2017: Undergrad Daniel Koshy was awarded an Honors College Undergraduate Research Grant!

09/2017: Grad student Sriivatsan G. Rajan placed as a Finalist in the UIC Image of Research Competition! His image is above (left side, 3 embryos).

08/2017: Congratulations to Kristin, Randall, Lynne, and Abbie on their accepted review "Neural Crest and Cancer: Divergent Travelers on Similar Paths", the first publication from the Saxena lab!

08/2017: Congrats to Jocelyn Garcia on an outstanding poster presentation at the end ​of the Bridges to the Baccalaureate program and her decision to stay on in the lab as an undergraduate student!

04/2017: Undergrad student Sam Malkana was awarded a Liberal Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Research Initiative (LASURI) Award!

03/2017: Congrats to our collaborator Dr. Dawood Darbar for a great score on his R01 application that the Saxena lab is a major part of! We look ​forward to working on this exciting project.

06/2016: Grad student Vijay Warrier won a Travel Award for the Society for Developmental Biology Annual Meeting in Boston, MA! He will be presenting his poster "Quantitative characterization of collective stem cell migration during olfactory neurogenesis".

05/2016: Chris Cicinelli was accepted into the Master of Science in Medical Biotechnology program at the University of Illinois!

04/2016: Grad student Kristin Gallik won UIC’s prestigious Award for Graduate Research!

04/2016: Undergrad Daniel Koshy was awarded a Liberal Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Research Initiative (LASURI) Award!

04/2016: The Saxena lab, along with the Prince lab (University of Chicago), received a CBC Catalyst Award grant!